Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway69123 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t the power come from the street? Seems like adding metered street parking wouldn’t be a big deal and a great source of revenue for gov to replace fuel tax that is lost

View on HN

There is a limited amount of current available from the electrical substations that serve any given area (and thus any given street), you can't just magic up enough current to be able to charge vastly more electric cars, it requires massive infrastructural change.

All the existing street chargers I've seen (there's a couple up the road from me) are like 1 or 2 here + there. Probably no more than 1 per thousand parking spot (might even be being generous there).

You'd have to install these chargers (which appear to require a fair bit of work to install) at every single parking spot in the UK to make it practical. Which is not really practical even if we had the money to do it...

And yet we manage to build skyscrapers.

Almost as if in the last 100 years we mastered the art of generating more electricity, laying out high voltage cables and constructing enough electrical substations to meet the demand, whatever that demand might be.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(Great_Britain)#...

The problem is breadth not depth. In the case of a skyscraper that requires more power you then have only to upgrade a localised substation. In order for the entire country to consume considerably more _current_ that requires a global upgrade everywhere. There are 400,000 substations in the UK.

I'm also not saying it's impossible, it's just something that the govt has to do first for this to even be feasible. It also makes the timeframe very impractical. The govt doesn't appear to ever address this or even begin the work required.

Surely funding these upgrades can be funded from the future booked revenue from the charging. I am sure the private sector would be chomping at the bit to capture a monopoly for these services as well.

This reminds me of the place near me. Essentially office building near at least two if not three factories. Had 2 charging stations expanded to 8 now there is new substation... So even in location where you would expect there to be capacity it was still required to install more...

London has added a lot of free/cheap charging points but they're not necessarily in convenient places for where people live. I think you can get a subsidy for adding a fast charger to your house but for people in flats, that's probably not an option (and also doesn't help if you have to park 300m away because there's just no room any more.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com